Introducing his first three novels in a 1980 omnibus edition, Frederick Forsyth called The Odessa File “the humane one,” to distinguish it from the pure craft of his debut and a nastier tone in his third novel.
More than 40 years later, I don’t think anyone has summed up Odessa File nearly as well. It is a very humane sort of thriller, all the more involving and exciting for that.
Take one modern fellow trying to right a terrible wrong, throw in a terror plot that realistically threatens an entire nation, and incorporate a knowledge of politics, bureaucracy, and automotive mechanics, and you have another Forsyth winner, but with more than a bit of heart this time.
In late 1963, Peter Miller is an enterprising young journalist in Hamburg, West Germany who writes up true-crime stories for glossy magazines. Chasing an ambulance one night yields a different kind of true-crime story, of a man who murdered tens of thousands of Germans relocated in and around Riga, Latvia over the course of several years.
For Miller, it touches a deep chord, but no one else cares to know about it, except this one shadowy organization dedicated to protecting this killer and many others just like him. Can Miller survive their interest long enough to satisfy his own need to know?
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Austrian SS soldiers, dressed in their normal black uniforms. According to Forsyth, they were the worst of Hitler's Reich. "...of the crimes against humanity committed on the German side between 1933 and 1945, probably 95 percent can accurately be laid at the door of the SS," he writes. Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/world/europe/franz-josef-huber-gestapo-nazi.html |
“The word is hardly ever mentioned in Germany, and just as certain members of the American underworld will stoutly deny the existence of the Mafia, so any former member of the SS will deny the existence of the Odessa.”
Thus Simon Wiesenthal, a famous real-life Nazi hunter Forsyth makes a character in his novel, explains to Miller what he is up against.
Now, before we go any further, it must be acknowledged that this Odessa thing, sometimes acronymed as ODESSA, is regarded today as a dubious construct, made up to give the semblance of an organized foe to something that was in fact a non-integrated series of covert channels and ratlines which spirited Nazi criminals away from the shattered hulk of Germany after the Second World War.
In The Odessa File, the title organization is a designated successor cell of the original Schutzstaffel, or SS. Moreover, it has graduated to perpetuating terrorism against the Jews by aligning itself with Arab countries planning the destruction of Israel. This is to be accomplished using missile technology developed in the Third Reich.
At the command of this “Operation Vulkan” is Austrian Eduard Roschmann, the same man whose Nazi past Miller sets out to expose.
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| An Egyptian missile on parade, circa the 1960s. German scientists were employed to help develop Egypt's rocket arsenal, though without producing much more than casings like this. In the novel, their link to the Nazi cause is more explicit. Image from https://twitter.com/fab_hinz/status/1375202949962608646 |
Coincidence is a common thing in The Odessa File, a point either in its favor or against it. Many reading it will notice the way various situations resolve themselves and credit the workings of an angry Jehovah, or delayed karma if you prefer. Others might see a callow young novelist cleverly but transparently moving his plot to a preordained end.
Either way, Odessa File is a white-knuckle speed run with plenty of hairpin turns to keep the reader invested. It is only after done reading that one wonders how the story resolved itself, what Alfred Hitchcock once called things that “hit you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”
Any
novel that follows The Day Of The Jackal, Forsyth’s debut and an
enduring milestone in the art of the thriller, is destined to disappoint on
some level. That said, the first two chapters of The Odessa File are as
brilliant as spy fiction ever gets; after that, it’s just pretty good.
The opening chapter sets into motion a world of underground Nazis and
underworld figures against the compelling backdrop of the assassination of
President Kennedy. This is a terrific opener for the way Forsyth employs
filigree and misdirection ploys; how Forsyth connects Miller to the story by
using news of Kennedy’s assassination is genius; he even finds a way of getting
the Beatles involved by recalling how Miller encountered them in their
Reeperbahn days, and bought his prize Jaguar from the proceeds of an article retailing
this fact.
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| We first encounter Peter Miller riding through Hamburg in his Jaguar. Above a night scene of the then-West German city from that time. Image from https://www.hippostcard.com/listing/hamburg-germany-50-60s-reeperbahn-bei-nacht/17248354 |
The second chapter is where the story really begins, with us reading over Miller’s shoulder as he explores the diary of a former concentration camp inmate, Salomon Tauber, a victim of Roschmann’s atrocities who reached a point of suicidal despair, alone in his apartment, the night of Kennedy’s killing:
Those things that I have tried to do with my life have come to nothing, and my efforts have been unavailing. For the evil that I have seen has survived and flourished, and only the good has departed in dust and mockery.
The Tauber section, which consists of long excerpts from his [fictional, but fact-based] diary, offers some of the most stunning testimony of man’s inhumanity to man. It is quite beautiful writing, very unlike Forsyth’s usual, methodically professional prose, and ends with a simple request from Tauber that someone say Kaddish for him in Jerusalem, something he never felt worthy of in life after witnessing so much death.
One element that gives The Odessa File punch in the early chapters is Miller’s struggle to overcome a reluctance by his countrymen to face the facts of the Holocaust. There is almost another conspiracy of silence protecting the Odessa itself. A magazine editor sends Miller away with a warning no one wants to read about Nazis.
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| Eduard Roschmann, as he appeared during the war and after, when he lived in Argentina under the name "Frederico Wagner." In the novel, Roschmann is portrayed as a sadist as well as a murderer. It seems more likely he left the actual killing to others. Image from https://alchetron.com/Eduard-Roschmann |
Even Miller, when Tauber’s diary is pressed on him by a police officer friend, has something of the same negative reaction:
“You must have heard, as we all have, about what the Nazis did to the Jews during the war and even before it?”
“Of course. They rammed it down our throats at school, didn’t they?”
The notion of Germany shaking its apathy and reclaiming its honor is a constant theme of Forsyth’s novel, something he oversells in places but which gives Odessa File a moral undertow. Four years before it was published came another spy novel, A Small Town In Germany, by another British master, John le Carré. There the Nazis were also a hidden threat, but one actively supported by the general population.
The reality in The Odessa File is more subtle. Germany’s economic recovery in the 1950s is promoted by Forsyth as a sign of healthy vigor and a new and better future. Time and again Forsyth reminds you that Roschmann’s real-life victims were not only Jews but Germans, too.
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| Residents of the Riga Ghetto, where many thousands of German Jews were relocated, are brought to a forced-labor assignment at a Luftwaffe clothing depot in 1942. Roschmann took charge of the Ghetto in 1943. Image from http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/ghetto/riga-01.htm |
Asked by Miller about whether he believes Germany’s younger people share the guilt of their fathers, Wiesenthal disagrees, calling it a construct that serves the Odessa better than the truth:
“The theory is the best ally they have, for they realize, as few Germans seem to do, that so long as the collective-guilt theory remains unquestioned nobody will start to look for the specific murderers – at least, look hard enough.”
Whether or not the real Wiesenthal actually shared that view (he also consulted le Carré on the anti-German Small Town), it provides a dandy starting point for Miller’s quest to reclaim some national honor in the process of bringing the killer Roschmann to justice.
Forsyth has another reason for Miller’s pursuit of Roschmann, which he reveals only at the end. But for us, that theme of justice is enough.
People who remember the 1974 movie adaptation with Jon Voight will notice several differences with the book, not always in the book’s favor. The movie is more ginned up as suspenseful entertainment, and provides a Hollywood ending, but it does move faster and smoother. It memorably employs an infiltration angle Forsyth only teases briefly.
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| Jon Voight as Peter Miller in the 1974 movie version of The Odessa File. The film co-stars Maximilian Schell as Roschmann and is satisfying on its own, if lacking much of the novel's depth and texture. Image from https://bluetowel.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/the-odessa-file-50-new-old-movies-for-the-51st-year-31/ |
I found Miller’s transformation into avenging angel a hard notion to accept, even re-reading it when I knew better what drove him. He is a reporter, with only the briefest military background as a postwar conscript. Suddenly he’s torturing secrets from hardened Nazis:
Bayer closed his eyes, and sweat rolled in torrents off his face. “No, not the electrodes. Not there,” he mumbled.
“You know what it’s like, don’t you?” said Miller, his mouth a few inches from Bayer’s ear.
To be fair to Forsyth, Miller is not entirely proficient in this role, and finds himself on the losing end of things more than once. He overplays his hand and takes terrible risks, recognizably an amateur that way.
The Israel angle is developed effectively enough, though I don’t know that Roschmann is a plausible figure at the helm of Operation Vulkan. We see him in flashbacks at Riga as a coward and a sadist with little intelligence, and that seems the verdict on the real-life Nazi, too. He didn’t return to Germany at any rate, as he did in the novel, living comfortably in South America until someone who had seen the movie informed on him. Roschmann died shortly after, while on the run.
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| Frederick Forsyth as he appeared in the back of the book jacket of a first-edition hardcover edition of The Odessa File. Image from https://www.biblio.com/book/odessa-file-forsyth-frederick/d/1388653651 |
Forsyth calls attention to this in his 1980 Omnibus introduction: “[H]e died of a heart attack – brought on, I hope, by the exertions of his flight.”
It provides for The
Odessa File a satisfying note of justice to go out on, more so maybe than
we get from the conclusion of the novel itself. Still, I enjoyed it for the constant
suspense and appreciated its views on Germany during and after the war, and
believe you will, too.
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